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In honor of the 50th anniversary of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination, Rachel Maddow spoke of the following links on her show last night. As promised, she posted them on her blog and I’m re-posting them here.

For you to peruse and process at your own pace, here are some of the JFK archival materials Rachel referenced this evening on the air, including the exceptionally rare footage unearthed from the NBC archives by Hardball producers earlier this week (above).

In the video below, conductor Erich Leinsdorf breaks the news of Kennedy’s assassination to the audience of the regular Friday afternoon Boston Symphony Orchestra concert at Symphony Hall.

“That’s when things got interesting. Ross dashed after Bachmann, repeatedly asking whether she had ever missed a House vote due to a migraine. She ignored him. Ross pursued her into a parking area behind the stage. Her aides grew alarmed. When Ross made a beeline for the white SUV waiting to carry Bachmann away, two Bachmann men pounced on him, grabbing and pushing him multiple times with what looked to me like unusual force. In fact, I have never seen a reporter treated so roughly at a campaign event, especially not a presidential one. Ross was finally able to break away and lob his question at Bachmann one more time, but she ignored him again.Afterward, I asked Ross-a hard-nosed pro who nevertheless seemed slightly shaken-whether he’d ever been treated so roughly. “A few times,” he told me. “Mostly by mafia people.”

TPM reached out to Bachmann’s camp for comment and will post their response.

Update: ABC Vice President Jeffery Schneider condemned Bachmann’s behavior in an interview with the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. He added that ABC has footage of the incident and will likely post it on their website soon.

“He was certainly shoved around and pushed,” Schneider said. “It’s unfortunate when physicality is involved. He was just doing his job.”

Second Update: The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake posted a response from Bachmann’s campaign on Twitter: “We didn’t have time for any questions and we made it clear … he disregarded repeated requests to stay back.”

Good thing President Obama released his long-form birth certificate. Now we can all go back to worrying about an even greater threat than the possibility that the President is a Kenyan double agent: the much buzzed-about reports that the world is going to end in 2012.

It was the Mayans — or maybe the Romans or the Greeks or the Sumerians — who called the shot this time, evidently on a day Nostradamus phoned in sick. Apparently, a rogue planet named Nibiru (which frankly sounds more like a new Honda than a new world) is headed our way, with a cosmic crack-up set for next year. No matter who’s behind the current prediction, there are enough people ready to spread and believe in this kind of end-of-the-world hooey that you have to wonder if the earth isn’t starting to take things personally. (PHOTOS: an illustrated history of the planet Earth.)

Regrettably, the Nibiru yarn got a boost in recent days with the very real announcement that an alignment of several of the very real planets will be taking place this month, offering a fleeting treat for stargazers willing to get up before sunrise and take a look. Even this genuine cosmic phenomenon, however, may be a bit less than it appears.

Beginning today and lasting for a few weeks, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and Mars will be visible in the early morning sky, aligned roughly along the ecliptic — or the path the sun travels throughout the day. Uranus and Neptune, much fainter but there all the same, should be visible through binoculars. What gives the end-of-the-worlders shivers is that just such a configuration is supposed to occur on Dec. 21, 2012, and contribute in some unspecified way to the demolition of the planet. But what makes that especially nonsensical — apart from the fact that it’s, you know, nonsense — is that astronomers say no remotely similar alignment will occur next year.

“Nothing bad will happen to the earth in 2012,” NASA explains patiently — if wearily — on its website. “Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012.” (See pictures of Earth from space.)

What’s more, even this month’s apparent planetary lineup is as much illusion as fact. In the same way a group of people scattered randomly across the room can appear to be aligned depending on your angle of sight, so too can planets that seem tidily arranged from one point of view turn out to be nothing of the kind when you look at them another way. The same question of perspective is true for our familiar constellations. View Orion from Earth, and he’s a hunter; view him from the other side of the galaxy, and he’s a frog or a tree or just a jumble of stars.

Like this:

Jay Carney, Vice President Joe Biden’s top spokesman, is taking over the post of White House Press Secretary, multiple Democratic sources confirmed to The Huffington Post.

Carney will be taking over the position being vacated by Robert Gibbs at a time when much of the original inner Obama circle is either leaving the White House or heading to Chicago to help with the re-election campaign.

Carney was chosen from a candidate pool of roughly five, including several current members of the White House’s communications team. One of those individuals, former DNC Communications Director Karen Finney (a paid contributor to MSNBC) praised the decision. “Jay will be great, he’s well respected, in addition to his background as a journalist, his work with the Vice President on domestic and foreign policy issues will be a huge asset,” she said.

In private, it was widely expected that Carney would end up at the post.

The choice caused a bit of rancor. Carney, who is known as being a bit more brass-knuckled than Gibbs and the other contenders, is, nevertheless, a creature of D.C., having previously served as TIME magazine’s Washington bureau chief. In that regard, he is no different than many of the other administration hires. But that was still enough to cause some eye rolls.

“Most of us thought that hiring someone from the outside was likely ‘too much’ change,” said one top Democratic strategist. More…

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2010.

At 26, Zuckerberg has put himself on the map not only as one of the world’s youngest billionaires, but also as a prominent newcomer to the world of philanthropy.

Earlier this year, he pledged $100 million over five years to the Newark, N.J. school system. Now, he’s in the company of media titans Carl Icahn, 74, Barry Diller, 68, and others who have joined Giving Pledge, an effort led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett to commit the country’s wealthiest people to step up their charitable donations.

Republicans will win big, and the press coverage will be glowing. But don’t forget: At the 100-days mark in his presidency, Obama walked on water. Howard Kurtz on the media’s mood swings.

Less than two years after taking office on a wave of hope, Barack Obama is on the verge of being slapped down by the electorate.

The president is so battered, politically speaking, that some members of his own party are sprinting away from him while Republicans whack him like a piñata.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The media assured us that the guy was headed for greatness. The nation’s journalists watched him in action, and in the last days of April 2009, delivered their collective verdict.

MSNBC’s Howard Fineman said Obama was “born” to live “calmly and confidently on a global stage with the hottest lights and biggest audience…. He doesn’t seem needy, aloof or afraid. We used to call that ‘cool.’ ”

Carl Cannon, writing at Politics Daily, said this: “He is as velvety smooth as a cold glass of Guinness, this new president of ours… not to mention the good looks of a Kennedy, the even keel of a Roosevelt, the understated swagger of an Eisenhower.” Continue reading…

Over at the National Review, Clifford D. May takes the mainstream media, including Time, to task for rolling over for the “terrorists” on the Cordoba Center mosque in downtown Manhattan. He does cite our poll which had 46% of Americans thinking that Muslims were more likely than others religionists to act violently:

Goodness, why would anyone think that? Could it have something to do with the fact that there have been close to 16,000 terrorist attacks carried out in the name of Islam since 9/11? Just last month, Time had on its cover the photograph of an 18-year-old Afghan girl whose nose and ears were sliced off by members of the Taliban because she had violated Islamic religious law as they interpret it by “running away from her husband’s house.” The word “Taliban” means “the students.” Students of what? Engineering? Dentistry? No. Of Islam.

Now, to say that this is slipshod slander of more than 1.5 billion human beings (minus maybe 20,000 extremists) is almost beside the point. Although I do find it offensive that Mr. May has problems with Sufis–among the most peaceful religionists extant–the former Cat Stevens, the Green Movement protesters in Iran, the “liberated” people of Iraq, plus several close Muslim friends of mine who are–at least, it seems to me–far more civilized than any hater who would make this sort of statement.

It can be safely said that Mohammed, unlike Jesus and Moses, was a prophet who took up the sword and this may have had some influence on some of his more extreme followers (Moses, a wise delegator, asked God to take up the sword against his enemies). It could also be said that western colonial assumptions about Islamic inferiority may have had something to do with creating the ghastly anger that attends the outer precincts of Islam now. And it could also be said that Christianity, in its crusading phase, spilled an awful lot blood and behaved, in general, in a manner that might have caused its pacifist Jewish founder to become a Buddhist or Zoroastrian, or a Sufi.

But none of this matters. Nor does the occasional immoderate statements made by the Cordoba Center’s founder, who truly seems a person attempting to create an important interfaith dialogue…most of the time.

Why doesn’t it matter? Because the Cordoba controversy isn’t about Islam. It is about America. It is about whether or not we take the freedom of religion clause in our Constitution seriously. And that is all the dispute is about. Period. I find it hilarious that conservatives who insist on the purity of the Second Amendment are such relativists when it comes to the First. I find it appalling that neoconservative Jews, whose presence and historic success in this country is a consequence of the First Amendment, would deny full rights to Muslims…and that, in their mania, seem to think that it’s all right to defame so many innocent people. (By refusing to acknowledge the specific and benign humanity of most Palestinians, for example–a too-common practice among American Likudniks–they relinquish the right to be assumed civilized themselves.)

I am, admittedly, a bit radical on this subject: I think Ground Zero itself–not a building two blocks away–would be a terrific site for a mosque, as a demonstration of American freedom, one of the truly superior qualities our nation offers the world. But you don’t have to agree with me. You don’t even have to like Muslims. You may be concerned about the senstivities of some of the families of some of the 9/11 victims; I certainly am; some of them are my neighbors. You just have to like the Constitution. I love it.

Update: Greg Sargent took Krauthammer to task for similar assumptions about the nature of Islam recently in the Washington Post.

In the midst of the mid-July doldrums, Barack Obama suddenly was beset by a zeitgeist tornado blowing in — hard — from the media and the opposition. A Washington Post headline blared that “6 in 10 Americans Lack Faith in Obama.” The Drudge Report, rippling off the poll, screamed, “CREDIBILITY CRISIS.” The New York Times asked 15 brilliant people to give the sinking Prez advice on its op-ed page. Charles Krauthammer, the neoconservative columnist, argued that the worst part of Obama’s failure was that he was succeeding — he was reversing Reaganism, with legislation like the health care and financial-reform bills. The President’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, noted, accurately, that the Democratic Party might lose the House of Representatives in the coming elections. This droplet of candor rendered the Speaker of said House, Nancy Pelosi, inexplicably apoplectic. Various commentators began to speculate that it was possible that the Democrats could lose the Senate as well.

Yikes. With all the hyperventilation, it was easy to gain the impression that something was actually happening. In truth, not much was. Take that Washington Post poll, for example. It was true that 57% of those surveyed had only some or no faith in the President’s ability to solve the country’s problems. But that was pretty good compared with, well, everyone else in town: 67% lacked faith in the congressional Democrats, and a mere 72% felt that way about the Republicans. By the way, the lack of faith in the President’s ability to fix the economy seems entirely rational to me: another short-term stimulus burst is needed, and so are long-term deficit-reduction fixes, but both seem beyond the Administration’s capability right now. On the other hand — in the midst of a fierce recession and the oil spill and a massive Republican smear campaign — Obama’s approval rating stood at a buoyant 50%, which was slightly higher than most other polls had him, all of which were higher than Ronald Reagan’s at a similar point in his presidency. (See TIME’s poll: voters like Obama, not his policies.)

It was certainly true that the Democrats were poised to take a shellacking in the coming elections. That’s business as usual; congressional campaigns almost always give heartburn to sitting Presidents. But the intensity of the reflux remains a mystery. The Lost Senate scenario depended on the Democrats’ dropping every last race imaginable — and even as the dire prognostications were being propounded, Harry Reid was rising from the dead in his Nevada Senate race (on the strength of the weird Tea offered by his Republican challenger), a pattern that could repeat itself in other states where the Republicans have settled on test-tube libertarians who want to privatize old-age entitlements, believe that people receiving unemployment insurance are lazy and still have doubts about the legality of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. (See “Harry Reid — The Democrats’ Inside Man.)

Even on the House side, the picture wasn’t entirely clear. A composite index of polls had the Republicans slightly ahead in a generic ballot (albeit with a far more enthusiastic potential electorate). But in the tawdry area of fundraising, a very precise leading indicator of success in congressional races, Democrats were thrilled by the fact that many of their vulnerable candidates — Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, Chris Carney in Pennsylvania, for example — had significantly outraised their Republican opponents. Here, too, the Republicans were evening the odds by offering strange brews of Tea against Democrats who tended to be solid, moderate Blue Dog sorts. (Several polls had the Tea Party’s initial, mildly favorable public impression turning sour.) (Comment on this story.)

This is not to say the President doesn’t have problems. The public is distressed by the recession and confused by Obama’s solutions. The financial-reform bill that the President signed on July 21 may tourniquet some of Wall Street’s excesses, but who could explain it? The big banks remain intact, with only a byzantine regulatory process standing between them and another bailout. There is no transaction tax to discourage the casino gambling in financial derivatives that fueled the crash. Indeed, the most accessible news from the bill is that one unpopular big (Wall Street) was impinged upon by another (government regulators), who don’t have a fabulous track record when it comes to being outsmarted by the Madoffs of this world. The other headline was that the bill funds 68 government studies, all of which — I’m sure — will be carefully read and implemented. (See “Financial Reform: Obama’s Triumph of Policy Over Politics.”)

This is a “solution” that doesn’t connect with the “problem” perceived by the electorate, which is the government’s affinity for bailouts. “The big guys got taken care of,” says Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, one of 53 congressional Democrats who lost their seats in the 1994 Republican tsunami, “and everyone else is getting hammered. There is enormous frustration about that, and people tend to take it out on the party in power.”

And so it will surely be this year, though perhaps not the apocalypse the zeitgeist warriors are predicting.